Do you believe in God? Why/Why not?

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tolu619 said:

Immersiveunreality said:

I also believe you can be able to see,feel,hear what you think is god and other things related to him using science.

Our brain is a trickartist that sometimes is fooling ourselves,you can trigger hallicunations with selfhypnose and the most important part is that you need to clear your mind and believe in something to make the brain to fill in the missing information itself with it's own audiovisual images/hallucinations.

You can try it with a sharp looking picture that if you stare at it for a long time and try forgetting it is a picture it might start altering itself in front of you.

You don't know the half of it. I'd love to hear your explanation for when God tells a third party to tell someone (for example, tells a friend to tell me) about something that neither I nor the friend could have otherwise known, and that thing turns out to come true. For example, God once told 3 completely unrelated people to warn me about the same thing, cause it was a life-threatening issue and He needed to drive the point home. Of course, as I said earlier, you have no reason to believe me. I could be making all of this up. But just assume for a second that I'm genuinely saying something that happened to me. How do you explain it away with your brain trick artist angle, or any other explanation you have?

Also, God created science. I've been a science geek since I was 5. Belief in God and science aren't mutually exclusive. I'm seeing a lot of arguments that sound like "God can't exist because.......science", and that makes no sense to me. That's like a computer program that is limited to 1s and 0s saying that human beings/programmers can't exist because they don't stick to the rules of 1s and 0s.

Without knowing the exact story, there are tons of possible explanations.

1.  You're lying.  I would generally not accuse people of this, but it's definitely a possibility.  

2.  You're mistaken.  Humans are flawed creatures.  I know that there are times I've been 100% convinced something had happened one way, only to be proven wrong.  Great episode of Seinfeld about this.

3.  Selective memory.  I'm not sure how god communicates with you.  But let's say these people warned you about a plane you are going to go on that wound up crashing.  You forget about the times people told you they had a bad feeling about something and nothing happened.  It's the same reason why a lot of people may be racist.  They remember the negative experiences they had with a person of a particular group, but forget all of the positive or neutral interactions.  

4.  Embellishment.  A variation on count 2, but often times when you here stories like this, they get more specific and extreme with each telling.  A preacher tells a story about how he needed money for his church and a new member of his congregation donated it.  The next time, he needed exactly 4000 dollars and they gave him a check for 4000 dollars.  Next time, god told them in a dream he needed a check for 4000 dollars.  Dishonesty?  Faulty memory?  Maybe a little bit of both.  

5.  We don't know.  Always a good and valid answer when you actually don't know. But go ahead and shoot.  Tell your story, I can tell you what I think.  Of course, right off the bat I gotta say I'm confused as to why god would have to go through such a roundabout way to warn you about something instead of just eliminating the threat himself, or telling you directly.  

As for god and science, I don't believe I've heard anyone say god CAN'T exist because of science.  What I've seen people say is that science is the best model we have of determining what is true about the universe, and that method can not lead you to god.  The head of the human genome project for instance is obviously a brilliant scientist, and is a devout Christian, but does not claim that his belief in god is scientific.